Collaboration Spaces

Social application digital tools like Wikis and Blogs are specific to communication and collaboration application that is used to share and engage students in learning expansion.

A wiki is a great place for students to collaborate on projects and is the foundation for creating and sharing digital content. The wiki serves as a reservoir for projects, assignments, links, resources and collaboration between the instructional facilitator and learner. Teachers can assign separate pages for students, write book reviews, and create a classroom newsletter reporting their project progress. Additional pages can be developed to collect hyperlinks that enhance the curriculum, a social studies page with text and  images with geographical locations using Google Earth and a math real world story problem page (with answers). Teachers can also create a page where students post their writing and responses or provide teacher notes on topics currently being discussed in the classroom. Another idea is to create a class picture book showing students actively engaged in creating and learning on their collaborative projects.

To keep the privacy of your classroom activities from being viewed by the outside world, you have the security capabilities to lock and unlock pages, as well as to decide what parts of your wiki will be protected by read or write permissions.  PBWiki also has built in plug-ins to create widgets that you can add embedded codes to store videos, polls, slide shows, calendars, podcast rss feeds, music, and documents.  To get started with a classroom wiki just simply  divide your class into groups of 4-6 students.  Assign each group one page to create and another to edit. Encourage everyone to help on any page.  To learn more about setting up collaborative classroom wiki projects continue visiting Tech N TuIt for upcoming articles and suggested activities for enhancing Literacy 2.0.

Blogs provide a communication space that teachers can utilize with students whenever there is a curriculum need to develop writing, share ideas and reflect on work being undertaken in the classroom.Blogs are a Web publishing tool that allows authors to quickly and easily self-publish text, artwork, links to other blogs or Web sites, and a whole array of other content. Blogs are set-up like conventional Web sites, with navigation links, and other standard Web site features. Blogs have one standard characteristic, however: the posting. Blog postings are text entries, similar to a diary or journal, which include a posting date and may include comments by people other than the author, photos, links, or other digital media.